Business

$13M funds McNealy's Wayin search for clues to social-media sentiment

Sergio Camacho, creative director for broadcast at Wayin, looks over one of the broadcast tweets to screen for The Weather Channel. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

On a recent weekday at Wayin's snug downtown Denver headquarters, CEO Elaine Wood is discussing how the tech startup will change the way companies use social media data when her director of business operations abruptly pops into the conference room.

"ESPN just signed," he says. "That's a goosebump deal."

To which Wood adds: "We've had a lot of good deals this month."

Beyond adding to its roster of roughly 100 customers, Wayin has secured $13.1 million of venture capital, a deal the company will announce Wednesday. The latest round takes its total funding to $33.5 million.

Elaine Wood, president and CEO, estimates that 40 percent of Wayin's workforce of 51 are former Sun Microsystems employees. Wood worked for Sun from 1998 to 2004, running Sun.com and its e-commerce business arm. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

Tech heavyweight Scott McNealy, who amassed his fortune by co-founding computer-equipment maker Sun Microsystems, launched Wayin in 2010. The company aggregates, analyzes and displays public posts from Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for business clients.

In its heyday, Sun famously claimed that it "put the dot in dot-com." Wood says Wayin will do something similar for social media.

"Social is at a stage today that e-commerce was in the late '90s. Who says e-commerce anymore?" Wood said. "In a few years, you're not going to say social."

In some ways, Wayin is a mini-Sun. Wood estimates that 40 percent of the startup workforce of 51 are former Sun employees. Wood worked for Sun, acquired by Oracle in 2010, from 1998 to 2004, running Sun.com and its e-commerce business arm.

Advertisement

US Venture Partners, an original Sun backer, is Wayin's lead investor, drawn by McNealy's involvement and the focus on social.

"I would put it under the broad umbrella of brands wanting to take control back of all the discussion and interaction in the social sphere about their brands," US Venture general partner Rick Lewis said in an interview. "Brands have felt like they're kind of losing control of that to the social media sites and are trying to figure out how to cope with that. ... We think that's a very interesting investment area."

Wayin initially launched its own social network, creating a platform where users could share polls, photos and other data and receive real-time feedback.

The company changed gears last year and started working with data from Twitter, Facebook and other existing networks that already had an established base of users.

Chaired by McNealy, Wayin is one of two companies with access to Twitter's "firehose" of tweets and the right to display them on third-party sites. Wood helped close that deal after joining the company in March 2013.

Clients such as the Weather Channel use Wayin's services to incorporate its online presence into its on-air shows.

Best Buy used Wayin's technology during the holidays to show online consumers items that were trending on Twitter, which generated a staggering 24 percent click-through rate on its "shop now button."

"We take all of this unstructured social jumble out there, and we organize it and we help you find what is most relevant and interesting to you," she said.

The company will use the latest round of financing, also led by US Venture, to develop sentiment analysis. The goal is to automate the process of determining the emotion behind a tweet or Facebook post. So rather than just stamping a tweet as positive or negative toward a company, the technology could determine whether the person was sad, angry or happy when they sent the message.

The next step for companies like Wayin is to focus on " intent signals," said Seth Grimes, principal consultant at Alta Plana, an IT strategy consultancy.

"You're scanning social media and you want to know not just how people feel about things, but what are they going to do about them?" Grimes said.

Wayin believes it is one of the few companies, if not the only company, that can mine social data, display the content and help clients take action, such as having users quickly submit photos or take polls on the company's website.

"That's a good place to be," Grimes said. "Whether you're making the business case that you're going to help people make money or not, that's another question."